Page 261 - swanns-way

repeating its double journey. Thrust towards the bank, its
stalk would be straightened out, lengthened, strained al-
most to breaking-point until the current again caught it,
its green moorings swung back over their anchorage and
brought the unhappy plant to what might fitly be called its
starting-point, since it was fated not to rest there a moment
before moving off once again. I would still find it there, on
one walk after another, always in the same helpless state,
suggesting certain victims of neurasthenia, among whom
my grandfather would have included my aunt Léonie, who
present without modification, year after year, the spectacle
of their odd and unaccountable habits, which they always
imagine themselves to be on the point of shaking off, but
which they always retain to the end; caught in the treadmill
of their own maladies and eccentricities, their futile endea-
vours to escape serve only to actuate its mechanism, to keep
in motion the clockwork of their strange, ineluctable, fatal
daily round. Such as these was the water-lily, and also like
one of those wretches whose peculiar torments, repeated
indefinitely throughout eternity, aroused the curiosity of
Dante, who would have inquired of them at greater length
and in fuller detail from the victims themselves, had not
Virgil, striding on ahead, obliged him to hasten after him at
full speed, as I must hasten after my parents.
But farther on the current slackened, where the stream
ran through a property thrown open to the public by its
owner, who had made a hobby of aquatic gardening, so that
the little ponds into which the Vivonne was here diverted
were aflower with water-lilies. As the banks at this point

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